Digital Marketing Analytics in Law Firms

It’s interesting to notice the placement of different industries on the digital marketing maturity curve. E-commerce, Retail, Banking, and Insurance are some industries that had an early start in leveraging digital marketing to identify, acquire and engage customers for their business. On the other hand, the traditional legal sector has been less reactive to technological changes in business development. As competition heats up and the pace of mergers increases, law firms have started embracing new age marketing and adopting multiple channels to reach out to their customers.

This positive shift in marketing approach for law firms has enhanced their business development activities. This shift has also provided these companies the opportunity to generate insights from the meaningful data collected during the customer journey and because of that, integrate their digital strategy with business development and marketing efforts. It’s important to note that the process of generating insights from mass amounts of digital marketing data is not that easy. Quite often I get into discussions where my clients in legal industries are seeking advice on performing correct analysis and determining meaningful insights for their business. In general, the responses to these queries are client specific, however, we can categorize digital marketing analytics more broadly into a few segments:

Performance Metrics:

Measurement in this category is targeted to understand the performance of digital marketing channels. Let's break them down further:

• Reach and Consumption Metrics: These metrics primarily look at the activities of visitors in the channels they use. They are likely to be at the Top of the Funnel. Typically- number of unique visitors, number of page views, average time on the site, downloads, form completions, email open rate, number of clicks, link click-throughs, SEO ranking, keyword search, and referrals are key indicators to understand the depth of activity.

• Retention Metrics: These metrics help measure the effectiveness of keeping your visitors attention beyond the initial touchpoint. The percentage of returning visitors, bounce rates, number of followers on social media channels, subscription, unsubscription, and opt-outs provide a good understanding of which visitors are disengaged.

• Engagement and Sharing Metrics: Engagement and Sharing Metrics: These analytics determine if the content was engaging to the readers and probe into the actions readers take after viewing the content. Important metrics to consider are - the number of retweets, likes, forwards, user’s session duration, page depth and referral traffic.

Operation Metrics:

Operation metrics focus on your activity as an organization and assess the efficiency of production and the return on investment for content development and marketing. There are some widely used metrics which quantify both production and the cost of operation. Some things to consider - the number of blogs and eBooks produced, turn-around time to produce content, marketing qualified leads (MQL), sales qualified leads (SQL), production costs, distribution costs and promotion costs are just a few metrics to consider, but there are many more you could measure.

Choosing the right metrics depends on the overall business objective of your law firm. In order to break this down, I recommend my clients start by focusing on metrics related to penetration and brand equity. This small step enables them to gain a foothold and also develop confidence with the analytics process. The next step is to look beyond transactional metrics and use advanced analytics to develop a relationship between customers and the brand.

It’s a good idea to start small and implement marketing analytics tools that are both intuitive to use and provide a lot of transparency into your marketing efforts. This process can seem overwhelming, but with some guidance and patience, you’ll be able to improve your processes and effectively measure your marketing analytics in a meaningful way.